Semantics and Disambiguation for LFG

[Tamer Mahdi]

(1) I'm aware of the following approaches to semantics for the LFG formalism:

- Projections and Semantic Description in LFG, in Halvorsen and Kaplan, [1988]

- The Lexical Mapping Theory in Bresnan and Kanerva, [1988].

- Semantics for Lexical-Functional Grammar in Halvorsen, [1983].

- LFG Semantics via Constraints in Dalrymple et al., [1993] and its
  extension in Dalrymple et al., [1995].

My question is: Are there any applied implementations for any of these 
approaches? And if so, how and where to access them?

(2) I have a few questions regrding Lexical and Structural Disambiguation:

2.1 I'm aware of Syntactic Closure as described in [Ford, Bresnan and Kaplan,
    1982]. Are the ideas presented in that paper implemented in the Grammar
    Writer's Workbench? If so, has there been any modifications to the
    initial proposal in Ford, Bresnan and Kaplan, [1982]. 

2.2 Are there any ambiguity resolution techniques used with any of the 
    approaches listed in (1) above? Are there any ambiguity resolution
    approaches that directly draw on LFG, or are designed with LFG in mind.

2.3 Specificaly for lexiacl ambiguity, are there any LFG related 
    approaches to resolve this type of ambiguity?

I'm a master student at the University of Western Ontario. I'm interested 
in applying and implementing semantics and disambiguation techniques for LFG.
I'll be greatful if someone can help me with any of the above questions.
Thank you.

Refrences:

- Joan Bresnan and Jonni Kanerva, [1988]. Locative Inversion in Chichewa: 
  A case study of factorization in grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 20(1).

- Mary Dalrymple, John Lamping and Vijay Saraswat, [1993]. 
  LFG Semantics via Constraints. In Proceedings of the sixth Meeting of 
  the European ACL, University of Utrechet.

- Mary Dalrymple, John Lamping, Vijay Saraswat and Andrew Kehler, [1995].
  The Semantics of Resource Sharing in Lexical-Functional Grammar.

- Marilyn Ford, Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan, [1982]. A Competence-Based
  Theory of Syntactic Closure. In Joan Bresnan, editor, The Mental 
  Representation of Grammatical Relations. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982.

- Per-Kristian Halvorsen, [1983]. Semantics for Lexical-Functional Grammar. 
  Linguistic Inquiry 14(4).

- Per-Kristian Halvorsen and Ronald Kaplan, [1988]. Projections and Semantic 
  Description in LFG. In Proceedings of the International Conference on FGCS,
  1988.



	Tamer Mahdi
	Computer Science Department
	University of Western Ontario
	Ontario, Canada